GREENING OF A VERMONT THEATER

It’s a Saturday afternoon. The air is balmy. Nowhere does summer seem more halcyon than in this unspoiled New England corner where flowers exult, parks are redundant and green takes on a whole new meaning.

Why would anyone here go indoors at 5 p.m. to see a play?

The reasons don’t differ widely from the ones in Southern California. Saturday’s audience for Alan Ayckbourn’s “Taking Steps” at the Dorset Playhouse consisted largely of the oldish and the very young--the parents and children of summer people in search of something a little different to do.

By definition, that “something” usually needs to be palliative and, with any luck at all, entertaining and fun. People don’t go to Vermont in the summer to brood. They go to get away from it all and the summer Dorset Theatre Festival’s season reflects that. This year it offered “Mass Appeal,” “Without Apologies,” “A Thousand Clowns,” “Taking Steps” (just closed) and “My Three Angels” (opens tonight). A diet of desserts.

(Some 45 minutes away, the long-established, very popular Weston Playhouse runs an annual gamut of well-attended, clean-living American musicals. These theaters succeed because they have learned their audiences want to be served, not stretched.)

The thing is to serve honorably, which they certainly try to do.

Ayckbourn’s “Taking Steps”--dealing, as his plays usually do, with marital breakups, flawed relationships and the role timing plays in our lives--takes place on three floors of one house. The set must be designed to incorporate all three on one level--that’s the gimmick--so the comedy takes on a visual dimension as the actors cross and crisscross the stage perilously close yet oblivious to one another.

Each must maintain the illusion of being on whatever floor the action dictates, which is fine if you’re working at the spacious San Diego Old Globe, where a superb production of this play was mounted in 1984. It’s much trickier when you’re working in a low-tech, modestly sized barn in Dorset.

Despite the serious space limitations, director John Morrison (a 10-year Dorset summer veteran) and designer William John Aupperlee (seven years) are sufficiently familiar with the premises to manage to overcome them. The set was not ritzy, but it wasn’t chintzy either. You sort of winced at the sound of thunder and rain coming from warping sheet metal and a rain drum, but 20 minutes into the play, the audience had accepted that this was an old Victorian mansion, that it was once a bordello, that the invisible stairs were where they were and that there were three floors.

The Equity company disported itself well with Derek Murcott, Patricia Hunter, Lauren Cohn, Kenton Benedict, Jim Shankman and Time Winters having a wonderful time disentangling the several tangled webs woven by Ayckbourn’s characters. Winters, a local favorite judging by the applause, didn’t quite have the mastery for some of the severely inarticulate speeches Ayckbourn put in his timid solicitor’s mouth, but there was a winsomeness there that made us willing to forgive. Audiences are a lot more lenient when they are on vacation and when they don’t have to pay more than $17.50 for a ticket and, with assorted discounts, frequently much less.

One complaint--something for this theater to consider--are the sight lines. Pretty atrocious. Even if the playhouse has only 218 seats (including some unusual double-wide ones on the aisles--for oversized patrons and honeymooners who can share one for the price of one), it should be a lot less trouble to view events on stage.

The otherwise attractive playhouse was built in 1929, or rather reconstructed from two pre-Revolution barns, and the seats are the original set. It was owned then and is owned now by the Dorset Players Inc., a community theater group formed in 1927 that still presents occasional performances during the year. Things don’t change much in Vermont.

The playhouse has been leased by various summer stock entities since the late ‘30s. The current artistic director, Jill Charles, and current producing director, John Nassivera, came as apprentice performers in 1968. They created the Dorset Theatre Festival as a nonprofit corporation in 1975 and have leased the playhouse every summer since. In the winters they harbor a writers’ colony around the corner in Colony House, owned by the festival and used summers for company housing.

Given the noncontroversial nature of the season, you can’t go too far wrong in Dorset (even if you can’t, by the same measure, go too far right). The festival is functioning at an enviable 85% of capacity (with only an 18% subscription base) and attendance year after year goes nowhere but up. Is it the plays, the hospitality, the ambiance, VCR backlash, the season, the summer, the state? Whatever the reason, and on its own terms (no one gets rich on 218 seats), Dorset must be counted a success.